Viewpoints

Sameer Pal has been with RIG almost since its inception. Previously he was with Mercer Management Consultants. Sameer is a RIG partner. A citizen of the world, he was educated in India, Botswana, and the United States. Not a convert (yet) to the religion of blogging, he was interviewed by RIG Principal, Shields Russell. Sam, why did you join RIG? I did the big consulting practice. I wanted stay in consulting but to do something entrepreneurial. RIG is an entrepreneurial project in its own right and we work with entrepreneurs. I like seeing the fruits of my labour becoming something…

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MoveMeOn was founded in 2011 to fill a gap in the recruitment market for providing select job opportunities to high quality candidates. We spoke to co-founder Nick Patterson, a former McKinsey consultant, about his iterative process of founding and growing a company. Your website talks of your ‘first attempt’ to change graduate recruitment at Cambridge, what was your vision for that? I set up a recruitment agency to place students in internships. When I was at university I did an internship at a small consulting firm, and I think the experience I gained from that was more valuable than what…

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Boosted by winning Athens Startup Weekend 2012, USEUM is described as "The social network for art, offering two key features; firstly an art archive i.e. the 'Wikipedia' of art that is built collectively, and then a podium for everyone to express their opinion and to publicly ‘Like’ and ‘Dislike’ aspects of art, as in all other subject-specific social networks." We spoke with founder Foteini Valeonti about her experiences in finding funding for her startup. As part of winning ASW, you won the chance to pitch at HackFWD in the Pitch in Berlin V2 event. Did you get funding for…

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Shhmooze is a smartphone app that makes networking at events and conferences fast, smart and effective. Michelle Gallen, founder and CEO at Shhmooze, explains how every event junkie out there can benefit from Shhmooze and why she admires founders. Could you start by explaining what Shhmooze is about? It comes from the fact that we felt that networking really sucks, it's hard work, it’s painful, it’s time consuming, and most of us are actually pretty rubbish at it. However, networking is really important when you are in business and even more so when you are in the startup world. I…

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Matthew Painter is co-founder and CTO of import.io, a startup currently in private beta that aims to revolutionize the way that we access, collect and analyse so called ‘big data’. We caught up with him over lunch to find out about his background and how he became an entrepreneur. Import.io is rooted in some serious programming, how did you become interested in computers in the first place? I had my first computer when I was 5 or 6, a Commodore VIC-20, and I started programming soon after that really. I started off using Commodore Basic, and soon enough was spending…

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Founded in London in 2011, Payumi is an online service that makes it easier and more efficient to collect money from friends or colleagues for a wide variety of social situations where people need to share the cost. Khurram Farooq, Founder & CEO of Payumi talks to us about the different challenges entrepreneurs face during the startup process and why he believes Payumi will change the way we manage our social financial relationships. How did you come up with the idea behind Payumi? Given my background in technology and digital media, I was pretty set on doing something in the…

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Tony O’Shaughnessy, founder of ABS, gave us some key points to consider when looking for investors for your company: “I think the very first thing you need to understand is why you are looking for investment in the first place. It sounds really obvious but you would be amazed by the number of people who think ‘if only we had investment we could do x, y and z.’ Thinking about money problems alone is a very naïve viewpoint. You should really make sure you know exactly why you want the money, what you’re going to do with it, and that…

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Dragos Ilinca is the CMO and cofounder of UberVU, a social media intelligence company with bases in London, Bucharest, and the USA. Dragos began our interview by describing the genesis of UberVU as it evolved out of a web-marketing consultancy into a social media posting platform, into a social media monitoring tool, into its current form as a social media dashboard with social media intelligence. In your opinion, what is the most difficult part of getting a startup off the ground? Is it getting funding, working together as a team, is it actually developing the product, or something else? Or…

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Andy Hutt is founder and CEO of triOpsis, a real-time visual intelligence company designed to provide technology that allows enterprises to use mobile devices to track the status of products and services on the ground. I can’t promise any words of wisdom at all, but I can promise words. 1) Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur rather than go down a more traditional career path? Lots of answers to that. As with most things in the world, life is a bit more complex than, I woke up one day and said, “Fantastic! I’m going to do this.” Life…

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Peter Collins, currently the CEO of Permasense, has obtained a PhD Computational Fluid Dynamics and an MBA prior to his various managerial and director roles. He built on his knowledge and skills as an engineer prior to management. This is perhaps the conventional way to proceed in one’s career, but there are many other opportunities for newcomers these days. The British schooling system creates a dilemma for students at numerous stages. Having to graduate with only few A-levels suggests that you are required to narrow your focus down at a very early stage. However, individuals’ personalities only shape after “teen” years, where…